Jane's World

Why does Jane Austen, the quintessential English spinster, have so many modern lovers ?

by Martin Amis
from the New Yorker, 1/8/96

Currently, it seems, Jane Austen is hotter than Quentin Tarantino. But before we try to establish what the Austen phenomoneon is, let us first establish what it is not. About eighteen months ago, I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (standing at a bus stop in the rain, for example); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out after ten or fifteen minutes. But these weren't normal circumstances. Beside me sat Salman Rushdie. For various reasons - various security reasons - we had to stay. Thus the Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned me to sit through Four Weddings and a Funeral; and no Iranian torturer could have elicited a greater variety of winces and flinches, of pleadings and whimperings. One was obliged to submit, and absorb a few social lessons, in agonizing surroundings. It felt like a reversal of the Charles Addams cartoon: I sat there, thoroughly aghast, while everyone about me (save the author of The Satanic Verses) giggles and gurgled, hugging themselves with the deliciousness of it all. The only good bit was when you realized that the titular funeral was going to feature Simon Callow. I clenched my fist and said yes. At least one of them was going to die.

"Well," I said, when it was over, "that was bottomlessly horrible. Why is it so popular ? "

"Because," said Salman, "the world has bad taste. Didn't you know that ?"

Still, bad taste doesn't quite cover it. I can see that the upper classes might enjoy watching the upper classes portrayed with such whimsical fondness. But why should it appeal to four hundred berks from Hendon ? In any post-war decade other than the present one, Four Weddings would have provoked nothing but incredulous disgust. A sixties audience would have wrecked the cinema. Yet now it seems that the old resentments have evaporated, and "the million," as Hamlet called them, feel free to root for the congenital millionaires. They can lapse into a forgetful toadyism, and abase themselves before their historical oppressors. Class is harmless, class is cute; class can even felt to be...classy. Four Weddings is of course deeply "sentimental" in the colloquial sense; it displays false and unworthy tenderness. But it is also sentimental in the literary sense; an exhausted form has been speciously revivied. Houses, parties, house parties, amorous vicissitudes in opulent drawing rooms and landscaped gardens, do's and don'ts, "p"s and "q"s, old money and unlimited leisure. To get in the mood for Four Weddings, imagine that you are the Reverend Collins on laughing gas. It is Jane Austen, in a vile new outfit.

Persuasion has recently been filmed, and so has Sense and Sensibility, and there are three versions of Emma in the works (not to mention Clueless), and no doubt someone will soon knock off the amiably mock-Gothic Northanger Abbey, and someone else will find the nerve to tackle the problematic austenities of Mansfield Park, and that will be that. For Pride and Prejudice has been most comprehensively taken care of, in the BBC's six-part, nine-and-a-half-million- dollar serial, which been emptying the streets of England every Sunday night (and which will arrive on American screens on January 15th). Austen fever, or more particularly Darcy-mania, is upon us. Features editors have been reduced to commissioning interviews with lorry drivers and insulation engineers who happen to be called Darcy; tourist pilgrimages to Jane Austen's house (in Chawton, Hants) were up about two hundred and fifty per cent in October, and sales of Austen tote bags, Austen crockery, Austen sweatshirts, Austen tea towels, and Austen aprons were comparably brisk; while you're listening to "The Jane Austen Music Compact Disc" (stuff she might have heard or played), you can rustle something up from "The Jane Austen Cookbook" (all ingredients have been modernized); and so on. Much of this enthusiasm is, of course, collateral enthusiasm, or Heritage enthusiasm; a blend of disembodied snobbery and vague postimperial tristesse. No doubt, too, many of the serial's ten million viewers watched it in the same spirit as they watched Four Weddings - contendedly stupefied by all the eccentricity and luxe. But such wastage is inevitable, and even appropriate. Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion play at the art houses. Pride and Prejudice plays in your living room; and - true to the book - it comes at you with a broad embrace.

Some may be funnier than the others, but all Jane Austen's novels are classical comedies; they are about young couples finding their way toward a festive conclusion, namely marriage. Furthermore, all Jane Austen's comedies are structurally the same comedy. There is a Heroine, there is a Hero, and there is an Obstacle. The Obstacle is always money (not class- Mrs. Bennet's origins are in "trade", but so are Mr. Bingley's). With the exception of Emma Woodhouse, all the Heroines are penniless and have no dependable prospect other than comfortless spinsterhood. As the Hero heaves into view, he will appear to be dogged by a female Rival - schemer, heiress, or vamp. The Heroine, for her part, will be distracted, tempted, or merely pestered by a counterfeit hero, a Foil - seducer, opportunist, or fop. The Foil can be richer than the Hero (Persuasion, Mansfield Park) and, on the face of it, much better fun (Mansfield Park). The Hero can also be uglier than the Foil. In her adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (which has a double Heroine), Emma Thompson does what she can to spruce up Colonel Brandon - the part is given to Alan Rickman - but the novel makes it plain that he is a pitiable old wreck of thirty-five. Brandon represents authorial punishment for Marianne's unrestrained infatuation with her Foil, John Willoughby (played in the film by the charmlessly handsome Greg Wise). The flaws of the Foil will highlight the Hero's much soldier merits. While the Heroines have foibles, the Heroes are all paragons. Two of them - Henry Tilney and Edmund Betram - are vicars.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen turned up the dial that controls the temperature of the comedy, giving it some of the fever of what we would now call romance. Both Rival and Foil are almost melodramatically garish figures; the self-woundingly feline Caroline Bingley, the debauched and self-pitying George Wickham. They create logistical difficulties, but neither is capable of mounting the slightest threat to the central attraction. For Elizabeth Bennet is the frictionlessly adorable Heroine in the corpus - by some distance. And, as for the Hero, well, Miss Austen, for once in her short life, held nothing back; tall, dark, handsome, brooding, clever, noble, and uninhibitiedly rich. He has a vast estate, a house in town, a "clear" ten thousand per annum. His sister Georgiana has thirty thousand pounds - whereas Elizabeth's dowry amounts to about a quid a week. No reader can resist the brazen wishfulness of Pride and Prejudice, but it is clear from internal evidence alone that Austen never fully forgave herself for it. Mansfield Park was her - and our - penance. As her own prospects weakened, dreams of romance paled into the modest hope for respectability. Persuasion was her poem to the second chance. And then came death.

This autumn, as the new serial got into its stride, distressed viewers rang up the BBC in tears, pleading for the assurance that fate would smile on the star-crossed pair and all would yet be well. I was not amony these callers, but I sympathized. And I quite understood why the Pride and Prejudice video, released midway through the run, sold out in two hours. When I was introduced to the novel, at the age of fourteen, I read twenty pages and then besieged my stepmother's study until she told me what I needed to know. I needed to know that Darcy married Elizabeth. (I needed to know that Bingley married Jane.) I needed this information as badly as I had ever needed anything. Pride and Prejudice suckers you. Amazingly - and, I believe, uniquely - it goes on suckering you. Even now, as I open the book, I feel the same panic of unsatisfied expectation, despite five or six rereadings. How can this be, when the genre itself guarantees consummation ? The simple answer is that the lovers really are made for each other - by their creator. They are constructed for each other: interlocked for wedlock.

Andrew Davies, who addapted the novel for television, was shrewd enough to regard his function as one of artistic midwifery - to get the thing out of the page and onto the screen in as undamaged a state as possible. After all, he had before him the example of Olivier-Garson version of 1940 (based on a script by Aldous Huxley, among others): cold proof that any tampering will reduce the original to emollient inconsequentiality. Huxley's reading is disastrously winsome; even Lady Catherine de Bourgh is still a good egg. Still, the adapter has to do what the adapter has to do. The pious and vigilant Janeite looks on, ever ready to be scandalized by the merest breach of decorum.

Very early on, we see Elizabeth in the bedroom she shares with Jane, saying, "If I could love a man who would love me enough to take me for a mere fifty pounds a year, I should be very well pleased." This puts us in the financial picture (and we will soon be seeing Mr. Bennet sighing over his account book); but it commits Elizabeth to a predisposed mooniness quite at odds with her defiant stoicism. Later, when the scandal of Lydia's elopement breaks, and Darcy gauntly takes his leave of Elizabeth in the inn near Pemberley, Austen writes, "Elizabeth felt how improbable it was that they should ever see each other again on such terms of cordiality as had marked their several meetings in Derbyshire." This translates as a one-line soliloquy: "I shall never see him again." Austen's lines show a brave face in adversity, Davies' an admission of a love Elizabeth does not yet feel. Each shifted brick threatens the whole building.

TV is TV, and TV Man wants visual equivalents for every "it" and "the". And the visual is always literal, funnily enough. Any protracted passage of background explication is accorded a lavish collage. Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, with its revelations about Wickham's character, inspires a scene set in Cambridge: Darcy in his gown and mortarboard, striding through a colonade, mounting the stairs - and surprising the smirking Wickham with a half-clad scullery maid on his lap. We see Lydia and Wickham's midnight flit (la, how they cuddle in the carriage !), we see Darcy pacing the festering streets of London in search of them, and we see the runaways in their bedroom at the rude tavern. Elizabeth and Darcy don't just think about each other, they have hallucinations about each other. They've got it that bad.

Davies' more minor interpolations are usually pretty deft and sometimes downright felicitous. But every Janeite is like the Princess and the Pea. Wickham doesn't say that Darcy "refused point blank" (although he might have done - the epithet is sufficiently elderly). Elizabeth would never say (skeptically), "Astonish me !" Even Lydia would not wonderingly repeat the (invented) line, "A whole campful of soldiers..." Nor would she say, "We shall have some laughs." When Elizabeth refuses Darcy's first offer of marriage, he notes that she spurns him "with so little effort of civility," whereas the book has the clearly superior "so little endeavor at civility." A few pages earlier, a nifty subjunctive is lost when "I expected at least that the pigs were got into the garden" becomes "the pigs had got into the garden." I could go on. But by now I feel I am trespassing on the reader's patience. Then again, I would argue that these tiny precisions, these niceties, are the atoms that constitute Jane Austen's universe. And after a long immersion in her work, I find that her thought rhythms entirely invade my own. Normal social intercourse becomes increasing strained. People look at me oddly. If, for example, the editor had called, to inquire after the progress of the present piece, I would have been likely to reply, "Nay, Madam, I find I get on excessively ill. I need more time alone with Jane. May I extort, then, the indulgence of a further se'nnight ?"

In David Lodge's novel Changing Places, a tweedy little British academic goes to teach at Euphoric State University, on the West Coast, while a big brash American academic goes to teach at a rain-sodden redbrick called Rummidge. The American, Morris Zapp, wearily begins his seminar:

The economic basis of society.

We of the nineties would most certainly shock Jane Austen, with our vast array of slovenly and unexamined freedoms. Nonetheless, there is a suspicion of cant in Auden's lines. "Brass" made Charlotte Lucas accept Mr. Collins ("disgracing herself" with a prudential marriage), but it didn't make her love him. Elizabeth turned down Mr. Collins; and with so little endeavor at civility, she turned down Mr. Darcy, too, with his ten thousand a year. Writing about Gray's "Elegy," William Empson said that the poem presents the condition of provincial oblivion as pathetic without putting you in the mood in which you would want to change it. But "change" is the business of satire. Satire is militant irony. Irony is more long-suffering. It doesn't incite you to transform society; it strengthens you to tolerate it. Jane Austen was indeed an English spinster of the middle class. She died in unrelieved pain at the age of forty-one. On the other hand, she has now survived for nearly two hundred years. Her lovers are platonic lovers, but they form a multitude.

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